


between the shadow and the soul

by hardboiledmeggs



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Grudging Respect, Handwaving, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Vignette, antagonists to friends to lovers, broken people being broken together, headcanons in story form
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-12 21:04:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10499439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardboiledmeggs/pseuds/hardboiledmeggs
Summary: “Don’t be stupid, Carter,” he says, pulling a carton of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket and tapping the package against the palm of his hand. “It’s always about you.”





	1. 1947, Los Angeles

**Author's Note:**

> This is just meant to be a series of short scenes in the same universe. I'm ignoring...most of the end of the _Agent Carter_ series, but picking up in Los Angeles.

  1. **1947, Los Angeles**



 

“She looks like you.”

 

Peggy’s eyes snap to Thompson. He’s looking at the body on the slab in front of them. His arms are crossed, his brow is furrowed. “The last one looked like you, too. And the one before that.”

 

Peggy scoffs. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she gestures towards the body - a brunette woman, young, covered from her shoulders to her toes with a white sheet - the third victim of a killer the newspapers have taken to calling  _ the werewolf _ . “Anyway, her face is… Her face is… How could you even tell.”

 

Peggy feels the bile rise in her throat. The woman’s face has been cut deeply on both cheeks; the medical examiner says the cuts alone could have killed her, were it not for a litany of other injuries. Even now that she’s cleaned up, it’s an unbearably grisly scene. The room suddenly feels too close. The stink of antiseptic and formaldehyde turns her stomach. She knows what it will look like if she rushes out of the room - it would be an unforgivable sign of defeat and delicacy.

 

Thompson looks at her, and he must see how pale and clammy she’s gone, because he grabs her by the arm and pushes her out of the room and into the cooler air of the hallway.

 

“Could it be her?” he asks as Peggy tries to clear her lungs. He’s leaning towards her, putting himself into her space like he always does. “Dottie? Or whatever the hell her name really is?”

 

She shakes her head. “It’s not clever enough. Just to cut up a girl like that - that takes a butcher, not an assassin.”

 

“Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe she’s trying to get your attention.”

 

Peggy huffs and rests her hands on her hips. “Then she has it. But it isn’t her. It isn’t about me.”

 

“Don’t be stupid, Carter,” he says, pulling a carton of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket and tapping the package against the palm of his hand. “It’s always about you.”

 

She doesn’t believe him. She doesn’t.

 

She doesn’t believe Thompson until she wakes up in an empty bathtub in a place she’s never been before, cold and wet, heavy and weak and paralyzed, dressed only in her slip, and with only a hazy memory of a brutal fight and a noxious-smelling handkerchief pressed against her face. Next to the tub, Dottie sits on a chair, perched, poised. Peggy feels like a fly caught in a spider’s web. She closes her eyes and tries to wiggle her fingers against the cool ceramic.

 

An hour later, SSR agents charge in with guns blazing. By then, Dottie’s had enough time to bruise and bloody her. Peggy nearly gets the feeling back in her hands and feet, is nearly ready to try...something.  _ Anything _ . But then a bullet pierces Dottie’s chest and Thompson sweeps into the tiny bathroom, lifting Peggy’s limp body as though she were a ragdoll and rushing her out of Dottie’s squalid apartment, filled with dark-suited SSR agents, and down to the street.

 

She’s hauled into the back of an ambulance and laid down on a stretcher. Jack clambers in after her. Every bump on the road to the hospital sends a fresh wave of nausea and shooting pain through her. 

 

“You never fucking listen to me,” Jack says, low and angry. He takes her hand and squeezes lightly. Peggy watches his face in the flickering light from passing street lamps. His jaw clenches. His eyes grow red and watery, but he doesn’t cry, and he doesn’t look at her.


	2. 1948, New York City

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Unkind words are said about Steve Rogers.

  1. **1948, New York**



 

“Where is everyone?”

 

Peggy looks up from her desk as Jack walks in, striding through the empty SSR office.

 

“I suspect they’re snowed in.”

 

It hadn’t been as bad as last year's blizzard, but under the weight of a foot of December snow, the city still grinds to a snail’s pace.

 

Jack rolls his eyes and places his hat on the hatrack just inside the door to his office. “City boys. Where I’m from, we’d barely even call this a flurry.” Peggy smiles, and looks down at her desk to hide it.

 

He gets his jacket off and hangs it up on a hook under his hat.

 

“Where are you from?” Peggy calls, just loud enough for him to hear across the room.

 

He freezes and turns towards her. He looks surprised that she’s abandoned the cool indifference they usually show towards one anothers’ personal lives. His eyes scan the office warily.

 

“Iowa,” he tells her quietly, like a confession. “My family, um, my family has a farm. Cows.” He shrugs and turns away from her again.

 

“That sounds nice.”

 

“It isn’t.”

 

Jack pulls a stack of files out of his office and sits at the desk across from Peggy’s. He turns towards her, spreading out and kicking his feet up on another agents’ desk. They’re both working on the same case - the whole office has been devoted to uncovering the Council of Nine - so, Peggy figures, it doesn’t mean anything if he wants to work together for the morning. Surely.

 

He lights a cigarette and she refuses when he offers her one. They work in silence for a while, Jack disappearing into a cloud of white smoke and Peggy leaning over her typewriter. It’s almost comfortable.

 

And then.

 

“You know, I saw him once” he says, looking up at her from the photographs he’s holding.

 

“Who?” Peggy asks, but she knows the answer.

 

“ _Captain America_ ,” he declares dramatically, as though he were the announcer on that vile radio program. Peggy does her best not to react. “I was on leave in Honolulu and the girl I was with wanted to see his act at the USO. After, she made me wait with her at the stage door for half an hour just to get his autograph.”

 

“What did you think of the show?” she asks, keeping her voice neutral and her eyes on her work.

 

Jack laughs. “You don’t want to know.”

 

Peggy sets down her pen and looks at him squarely. “Go on, then. I saw it, too.”

 

Jack lets loose a long breath and gives her a dark, challenging look. “I thought he was a damn coward. I’d been in the war for two years, _two years_ , and I’m sitting in this audience full of people going crazy over a guy in tights.”

 

Peggy thinks of Jack in his dress blues watching Steve in his costume. She runs through a mental timeline of the war, trying to think of what Jack had lived through by then. Her brow furrows; she remembers world maps dotted with pins and miniature flags. One word rises up: _Guadalcanal_. She chews at her lower lip; she knows exactly what Jack thought of Steve that night.

 

“I’m looking at this guy,” Jack leans forward, gazing into the distance and pointing his finger as though he were transported back in time and space, as though he were still in that theater, “And I’m feelin’ like the war’s busted me into a million pieces, but he’s up there just... _whole_ . He doesn’t know a goddamn thing about shooting somebody or sticking your bayonet in their belly. He’s never seen his buddy call out for his mother while he’s holding his guts in his own two hands. He doesn’t know a goddamn thing.” Peggy cringes, but she doesn’t stop him. He sags back into his chair. “And I’m sitting next to this pretty nurse who’s only gonna fuck me so she can pretend I’m him. _Him_. And, hell, I probably wanted her to. Sure beats the truth. What I wouldn’t have given to be that squeaky clean. To have no blood on my hands.”

 

He catches himself and straightens his back. “Sorry, Carter. Sometimes I forget you’re a lady.”

 

She gives him a weak smile. “I suppose that’s a compliment.” Peggy takes a deep breath. She thinks for a long moment; she’s always known what Steve meant to her, to the SSR, to his unit, but she never gave much thought to how any other soldier might have thought of him. She’d always assumed he’d been a hero to everyone, just because he’d been a hero to her.

 

“But he did fight,” she says finally, “He _died_.”

 

“Yeah,” Jack purses his lips. “I saw the newsreels.”

 

Peggy gives a little huff - enough to let him know that she’s offended.

 

“Sorry,” he says, and he looks contrite enough. “I shouldn’t’ve...I know he was your fella.”

 

Peggy looks down at the desk between them, at the cluttered pile of papers and photographs marked up by Jack’s red pen and her blue one. “It’s alright,” she says quietly. “We all fought a different war.”

 

Jack stands, goes to his office and returns with two glasses and a flask. He fills each glass half-full with amber liquor. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s barely 11 o’clock in the morning; Peggy takes her glass and takes a long swig. Jack sits and does the same.

 

She shrugs her shoulders. She hears the words in her head before she says them, and it stops her cold: _I like it when you’re honest with me._ She winces; something about it seems too intimate, and she silently thanks God that she had the presence of mind to rephrase.

 

“I appreciate your honesty,” she says at last.

 

Thompson smirks, taps the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray and leans back over his paperwork.

 

“I’m always honest with you, Carter. Whether you like it or not.”

 

She smiles.

 

“I know.”


	3. 1950, outside Buffalo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one takes place sometime after the transfer from the SSR to SHIELD. I'm assuming Thompson would essentially retain his position, and that Peggy would have some kind of (vaguely defined, as yet) superior position.

  1. **1950, outside Buffalo, New York**



 

“I’m just saying,” Peggy says, tucking her last bite of sandwich into her mouth, “You’re taking an awfully big risk, saying that.”

 

Jack laughs and sips his coffee. They’ve been stuck in a Chrysler from SHIELD’s fleet for over an hour, parked outside of a warehouse that’s been a cover for a covert HYDRA operation. In the course of the last several missions, their stakeout conversations have turned from banal to personal, and when, at last, their partnership had started to take too intimate a turn, they had course-corrected to only discussing controversial topics - concepts on which they could take comfortably opposing viewpoints. And so, having already argued about politics and money, they’d at last confronted religion.

 

“You English are all _God, King and Country_ , but you must know it’s all just a bunch of bullshit.” He pulls a face. “God is...prehistoric. Didn’t you learn anything in the war?”

 

“I learned plenty,” she shifts in her seat, turning her body towards him. “I learned the opposite, in fact. You ought to be worried I’ll turn you in to SHIELD. You’re only a heartbeat away from quoting Marx.”

 

Jack smirks, but gives her a serious look. “Careful, Carter.”

 

Peggy smiles and looks away, taking a long breath to settle the quick flutter of excitement that ripples through her.

 

And then - a shadow of movement in the dark outside the car makes them both reach for their pistols, and the night’s begun.

 

By the time they get back to their motel - a cheap place with scratchy sheets and stains on the carpets - they’re both bruised and sweaty and beat up. Peggy makes a hasty retreat the their rooms’ bathroom and closes the door behind her.

 

It isn’t their first time undercover together, but they’ve never shared a room before, pretending to be married and uninteresting. Something about being alone with Jack, being with him as he brushed his teeth and slept and woke up in the morning had felt unbearably personal and, in the privacy of their room, she’d done her best to avoid and ignore him. In that tiny room, she’d felt a fundamental crisis in confidence, utterly unsure of where her heart was leading her.

 

She’d slept on the bed, wearing her ugliest, most conservative pajamas and trying not to notice the way Jack’s pajama pants hung on his hips. He’d pulled a pillow and blanket to the room’s cramped sofa. The worst of the arrangement had come on the first night, when Jack had woken up shouting “ _[get off the beach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima#Situation_on_the_beaches)_ _”_ loud enough to wake Peggy and, she supposed, half of the motel’s occupants. In the dark room, he hadn’t look at her, just lied back down and turned his back to her. For the next hour, she’d clenched her fists and forced herself to ignore his heavy, ragged breathing and the way his body had shuddered and curled in on itself on the narrow couch.

 

Now, in the shower, she washes off the mission’s grime and thinks about how glad she’ll be to be back in New York tomorrow, back home, back in a place where she won’t have to think about Jack.

 

She dresses and leaves the bathroom, followed by a billow of steam. Jack’s taken off his jacket, hat and tie, and opened his shirt buttons at the collar and cuffs. He stands, and when he looks at her, she sees something dangerous flicker in his eyes - a dark flash of the kind of desire she can’t yet admit she feels. He passes her on his own way into the bathroom, making too much of a show out of walking around the bed. His hand presses against the curve of her waist, as though to steady himself or her, and lingers too long.

 

It’s happened before - his hand at the small of her back, his gaze on her mouth as she talks, the fond way he smiles when she needles him about his paperwork - those little reminders of how easy it would be for them to make their lives so much more complicated.

 

“Don’t,” she says quietly, and his hand drops away.

 

He stops and looks away from her; his expression is thoughtful and serious.

 

“Why not?” Jack asks at last, and there’s a plaintive curiosity in his voice that undercuts the challenge.

 

Peggy takes a breath. He looks at her. He’s standing so close; she can smell gunsmoke and cigarettes and cologne. She can feel the heat coming off his body.

 

“It confuses things.”

 

“Is that bad?” he counters.

 

“Jack…” she starts weakly, blinking and looking away from him. She knows she doesn’t have a good answer. “Agents of SHIELD ought to...ought to embody a certain professionalism, a certain _decorum_ , while on a deployment.”

 

At that, he looks positively affronted.

 

“I don’t know how you can stand it, Carter,” he shakes his head. “Maybe _you’ve_ got ice water in your veins, but I don’t.”

 

Peggy glares. It’s easy to be offended. “What on earth does that mean?”

 

He sets his jaw, fierce and stubborn as she is, and steps closer, crowding her even though (or perhaps because) he knows she won’t back down. “All I do is follow your lead,” he says; his voice is gravelly and thick. “You want to be the most professional agent at SHIELD, even when nobody’s looking? Fine. I’ll keep my hands to myself. But I’ve seen how you look at me, Carter. I’ve seen---”

 

Peggy throws up her hands and moves away from him. “I don’t know _what_ you’re talking about,” she bluffs and sputters and crosses her arms. She feels overheated and desperate. “You’ve...you’ve lost it.”

 

Jack stands still, tilts his chin up, looks at her plainly, without pretense. “There’re times when I want you so bad, my bones ache.” Peggy purses her lips and closes her eyes, bracing herself against the wave of desire that rocks through her at just the _thought_ of him wanting her. _Stupid_ , she chastises herself. _Weak._ Jack presses on. “You want to tell me you never once thought of me like that?”

 

She can’t. For all that she’s a master of deception, there’s something too fundamentally honest inside her to lie to him, now. She feels her chest tighten. “Please,” is all she can whisper, and the word alone makes Jack sigh and turn away from her, rubbing his hand across his forehead.

 

She’s spent so much time thinking of what others might think of her - Angie, Howard, Edwin and Ana, Daniel, the entire SHIELD office - if they knew. If they knew that she’d come to consider Jack a friend, that she appreciated his bluster and arrogance for what it was, and for what was hidden under it. That she liked talking to him. That she liked being sent out on assignments with him. That in the past year she’d started to wonder what it would be like to be held by him, to kiss him, to make love to him. What would they all think, if they knew that just the thought of him burns her up inside.

 

Jack turns back to her with fire in his eyes. “I know what it is. It embarrasses you, right? Right?” he repeats sharply when she looks away. “You show up one day with me on your arm, and people’d whisper about _how far you’d fallen_ , and you couldn’t take that.”

 

She looks at him with watery eyes. “That’s right,” she admits, and his face falls. She isn’t sure what she’s more ashamed of - that she cares for him, that she worries too much that the people she loves wouldn’t love her back if they knew, or that he knows how she’s been denying what she wants for the sake of appearances.

 

She blinks and swallows, forcing herself to stop short of crying. Surely enough of her heart is exposed now, without adding tears to the evening.

 

“I can be better,” Jack is telling her. “Just...just tell me what to do. I can’t be--” he stops himself and cringes, “But I can be better. I can try.”

 

A thick, awful silence hangs between them for a long moment. “Oh, god,” Peggy says, breaking at last, pressing her hands against her face. Jack crosses the room towards her, quick and alarmed by the sudden display of emotion. Still, he doesn’t touch her.

 

“Tell me you never wanted me,” he says, desperate. “Please. I swear I’ll never bring it up again.”

 

Peggy shrugs, hopeless, wiping the dampness from her cheeks and looking up at him. “You know I can’t. You know I did. I do.”

 

He freezes, gaping at her for a moment, then, slow and hesitant, like he might spook her, he reaches for her. And, for once, she lets it happen. His arms fold around her shoulders, her cheek rests against his chest, one hand traces the line of his suspender. Peggy feels her heart swell; she can count on one hand the number of times she’s been held by a man since the war ended.

 

When Jack leans back and tilts Peggy’s face towards his with his hand, when he finally pulls her closer and kisses her, it’s almost unbearably slow and sweet. She had expected him to overwhelm her, to crush her under the weight of his passion and lust. Instead, his mouth moves against hers not like he wants her, but like he _loves_ her. It strikes Peggy that she had been thoughtless enough to think that she had already discovered everything hidden under his abrasive veneer - his war stories and hidden flasks and disarming vulnerability. Still, he surprises her.

 

Jack presses a line of kisses from the corner of her mouth, down the delicate skin of her neck. His hands run across her back, pressing their bodies together. Peggy lets herself feel dreamy and lightheaded and loved.

 

“Nobody’d have to know,” he whispers against her shoulder. “You know I can keep a secret.”

 

Peggy doesn’t say anything, just lets him kiss her again, kisses him back, winds her arms around his shoulders and leans up on her toes. When she pulls back to look at him, it takes him a moment to open his eyes, as though he were holding on to the moment as long as he could. Up close, he’s strikingly beautiful and, for once, Peggy can admit it to herself.

 

“I couldn’t do that,” she says, shaking her head. The hypocrisy inherent in the idea that she could make love to him privately but turn her nose up at him in public is abhorrent. “You...you deserve better than that.”

 

She sees the muscle in his jaw twitch. He tries to smile. “Hey, it’s not like it’d improve my reputation, either. Maybe it’s the best way for both of us.”

 

They both know he’s bluffing. In the transition to SHIELD, his reputation as an effective SSR chief had been quashed by Howard’s disfavor. Peggy knows that though his professionalism hasn’t wavered, he’s essentially friendless at the agency. Peggy’s already stood apart from the crowd in her willingness to be partnered with him; anything more, and she’d be the star of the SHIELD gossip mill for generations to come.

 

“There _are_ SHIELD policies against this sort of thing,” she muses, pressing her palms against his chest, marveling at the closeness of him, at the warmth of his body under her hands.

 

“Which you wrote,” Jack adds, lifting his eyebrow.

 

“How prescient of me.”

 

He smirks, then pulls away from her and disappears into the bathroom. He emerges fifteen minutes later in just his singlet and cotton shorts, with damp hair and clean-smelling skin. He pulls her back into his arms, kisses her, and as he undresses her, Peggy half hopes, half wonders, if this might be all they need - one night to get each other out of their system. Perhaps, she thinks, in the morning it’ll be done.

 

Instead, she finds him to be too ferocious and generous a lover to give up easily. He learns quickly what to do to make her gasp and clutch the bedsheets and come. He lets her pin him to the mattress, squeezing his wrists with her hands as she straddles his hips. He lets her tug his hair, lets her run her teeth down the skin of his neck and score her nails down his chest. For all that Peggy’s surprised by how gentle he is with her, he lets her be rough with him.

 

In the morning, she lays in bed and watches him dress, covering the tapestry of bite and scratch marks she’s left on him under a crisp white shirt. The thought of that - that she’d marked up his body and he’d let her - makes her pull him back to make love to him once more before they pack their bags.

 

“What’ll we do?” she asks later, as they drive back to the city. “When we get back?”

 

Jack shrugs, leaning back in his seat and steering the car with one hand. “Write it up. File our report. The usual.”

 

He glances over at her, and she gives him a withering look.

 

“Don’t be clever.”

 

Jack smiles and turns back to the road.

 

“Like I said, Carter, your secret’s safe with me.” Peggy watches as something dark passes over his expression, and her gut twists. “I got an apartment in Queens,” he says, squinting in the bright daylight, “I bet nobody knows you in Queens.”

 

She shrugs and shakes her head.

  
“Well, then,” he looks at her again, tilts his chin, smirks, “You oughta come visit me sometime.”


	4. 1952, New York

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: A very unreliable form of contraception is used in this chapter, because 1950s. FYI. (This truly is not foreshadowing, I just don't want you all to think I endorse this method.)

**4\. 1952, Washington DC**

  
  


“I heard a rumor about you.”

 

“Hm.” Sitting across from Howard on a private flight from Washington, D.C., to New York, Peggy crosses her legs and unfurls a copy of the  _ Times _ across her lap. She shrugs her shoulders and tries not to let her body go tense. “I’m afraid I haven’t got much use for rumors these days.”

 

Howard tilts his chin up at her. He’s serious and unsmiling; every inch the director of SHIELD, not the friend she flew over Austria with in ‘43.

 

“It was about you and Jack Thompson.”

 

Peggy sighs and slowly folds her paper. She looks at him, feigning innocence and exasperation.

 

“Are you really going to traffic in gossip now?”

 

“How long has it been going on?”

 

She shakes her head, looking out the window at the shimmering curves of the Delaware River, miles and miles below them. The plane’s engine whirs; behind her, Peggy can hear the quiet chatter of stewardesses. She straightens her back and looks at Howard. 

 

“I’ve known Chief Thompson for years.”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“Yes,” she frowns, “I know what you’re trying to imply. And I have nothing to say about it.”

 

The past two years have been filled with moments like this - little denials that cut her to the core. Moments when she is utterly dishonest with herself, with Jack, with everyone. It’s helped that every public denial, no matter how painful, has been tempered by almost-unbearable private contentment. However much of her heart she refuses to acknowledge, even she can’t deny the satisfaction she’s felt waking up in a bed warmed by their bodies or the comfort she’s found in Jack’s arms.

 

The plane hums along for another half hour before she feels their altitude start to dip as they approach the city. The thought of what the afternoon will bring - a lunch meeting with Howard, and three of SHIELD’s bureau chiefs, including Jack - makes her chest tighten with anxiety.

 

“He’s nothing like Steve, that’s for sure,” Howard says as the wheels hit the runway and the plane jostles to a stop.

 

“What?” 

 

The engines whine and fade. Howard gives her a significant look. She knows who he means, and Howard knows she knows. It’s always been like this between them - Peggy sometimes feels as though they were secretly twins separated at birth and reunited, bound together by a cryptic mutual understanding indecipherable to the outside world. 

 

“Of course he isn’t,” she hisses, tearing open her seatbelt and standing, “No one’s  _ like _ Steve. No one’s like  _ you _ , or  _ me. _ Everyone’s bloody different.”

 

It’s easy to be angry. It’s satisfying to grab her handbag and storm off an airplane and into a waiting taxi. 

 

It’s harder to face the truth.

 

-

 

Howard calls them “the crew that brought down Whitney Frost”: Daniel Sousa, freshly flown in from Los Angeles, Aloysius Samberly, the recently-anointed head of SHIELD’s Chicago office, and Jack and Peggy, still stationed in New York, though she’s risen to the rank of Assistant Director of SHIELD while Jack has stalled at Bureau Chief. Howard spends the morning briefing them on mind-numbing congressional maneuvering and constantly-hovering budget cuts, then takes them to Keens for a too-extravagant, boozy steak lunch. By the second course, the four men are well on their way to an unprofessional degree of soused.

 

Under the table, Peggy taps Jack’s leg with her toe twice - a warning code - and he turns down a third round of bourbon. He looks at her and gives a barely-perceptible nod; she can see that he’s on edge with Howard, too. After a beat, he looks at her again with just enough of a smile, just enough heat in his gaze to send a wave of excitement through her. She’s spent the last week in D.C., and the sight of Jack, the closeness of him, is like a balm. She can already feel her body humming with anticipation to be touched and kissed and loved. 

 

Howard holds court, as usual, directing the conversation from his own over-told, overly-embellished war stories to ridiculous tales of his political and romantic conquests in the nation’s capital. And then, after a lull, Peggy sees him give Jack a long, appraising look, and braces herself.

 

“Wher’re you set up, Thompson?” he asks, crossing his arms across his chest.

 

Jack shrugs. From across the table, Peggy can see that he’s pulled taut.

 

“I bought a house up in Connecticut,” he says in a bland, neutral tone. Howard grunts and takes a swig of his martini.

 

“Whereabouts, exactly?” Howard slurs, then leans forward, setting his elbows on the table. Peggy clenches her hands in her lap.

 

“Cos Cob.” 

 

Peggy can hear the reluctance in Jack’s voice, and she knows Howard will hear it, too. 

 

“ _ Cos Cob _ ,” Howard repeats, smelling blood in the water and turning towards Peggy. “How’s Cos Cob, Peg?”

 

She does her best not to think of the house in Cos Cob - a place where she’s felt happier and more alive than she has since the war. A place of long, whiskey-soaked weekends and sunny backyard summers, where they had made love and cooked for each other and watched the seasons change, where they had pretended, together, that they were allowed something approaching a normal life.

 

She shrugs a shoulder and smiles. “I’ve heard it’s very quaint. Would you agree, Chief Thompson?”

 

Jack nods and looks straight at her with a familiar expression: impressed and accusatory and wounded. She sucks in a breath.

 

“I would,” he says, and reaches for his half-empty glass of bourbon.

 

Howard looks between them. “Just forty-five minutes out of the city and I bet no one’d know you from Adam and Eve. Bet it’s refreshing.”

 

Dessert is served and the topic turns to Sousa’s new wife and Samberly’s dysfunctional Chicago office. Howard’s just finished his last bite when he turns back to Jack.

 

“Tell me,” Howard leans back in his chair. “How long have you and A.D. Carter been…” he swings a finger back and forth between them meaningfully.

 

“I’m not sure I understand, sir,”

 

“Fucking,” Howard says, enunciating each syllable. “How long?”

 

Peggy’s gorge rises; in an instant, she turns hot and furious. Next to Jack, Daniel shifts uncomfortably and shoots Howard a reproachful look. Samberly gapes and stares.

 

Jack just blinks, slowly, and answers. “I think you’re mistaken, sir.”

 

Howard raises a hand to point squarely at him. “I hope so, Chief Thompson. I’ve got the DOJ ethics office on my ass enough as it is. Nobody gives a shit if you want to fuck your secretary, but this woman,” he turns his wrist to point at Peggy, “is your goddamned boss.”

 

“ _ Howard _ ,” Peggy manages through gritted teeth. She looks at Jack and wills him to look back at her. Instead, he’s eerily still, looking at Howard as though he were the only one in the room. As though he’d like to tear him to pieces. 

 

“Don’t worry,” Jack says, cold as ice, “I wouldn’t dare.”

 

“Good,” Howard says, still skeptical. “I’m sure you want to keep making payments on that nice house in Cos Cob. Best to fall in line.” Jack frowns; Peggy can see the muscle of his jaw work. The wounded look she’s grown accustomed to seeing in his eyes is back. A hot flash of desperation and indignation hits her. Next to her, Howard presses on indifferently, “And besides, you ought to know you’ll never be—”

 

“Two years,” Peggy hears the words a split second before she realizes that she’s the one who’s spoken them. 

 

Howard turns to her. She can feel Jack’s eyes on her now, too.

 

“You asked how long,” she blinks and takes a breath, trying to keep her courage up. “That’s…That’s your answer.” 

 

For all his bluster, Howard turns speechless for a long moment.

 

“That’s a hell of a long time,” he says, quiet and thoughtful for once. “A hell of a long time.”

 

Peggy risks a look around the table. Samberly’s gone quiet and wide-eyed. Jack stares at his hands with a furrowed brow and tense shoulders. 

 

Daniel gives her a gentle smile. The utter lack of surprise in his expression floors her; he had  _ known _ , she realizes, and she wonders how long ago he’d figured it out. He pulls his napkin from his lap and sets it on the table, then pats Jack’s shoulder.

 

“I think we ought to head back,” he says quietly, giving Jack the same characteristically kind look. He tells them that he needs to call Los Angeles before their afternoon meeting with the governor, and, as if on cue, Jack offers his office, and the three bureau chiefs retreat, leaving Howard and Peggy alone with a table covered in dirty plates and half-full martini glasses.

 

“Well,” Peggy says at last, “Which of us are you going to fire?”

 

“No, Peg, no,” he reaches for her hand. She cringes, but she lets him touch her. “I’m not going to fire you. But you’ve got to come back to D.C. with me.”

 

“Howard…” she starts. He’s been threatening her with it for years: a relocation to SHIELD’s D.C. headquarters. She’s invariably argued that she couldn’t bear to give up her apartment in Bay Ridge, letting Howard assume that her attachment to Steve has kept her in Brooklyn.

 

“We’ve got to break up the chain of command,” he shakes his head. “And anyway, you know you belong there. That’s where the work is. We need you.” She huffs and pulls her hand away. Her mind races, searching for a strategy, for whatever Howard’s weakest point is. But then he presses on, irritated. “Listen,” he says, “Either you go to D.C. or we open an office in Omaha and ship him there. You pick.”

 

She glares. “One of these days you aren’t going to get what you want from me.”

 

Howard smirks at her, victorious. Peggy knows that this is how he is at his worst: possessive, callous, smug, and drunk. 

 

“Don’t be so sure,” he tells her.

 

At that, she pushes her seat away from the table and leaves. Outside, the chilly autumn air is a welcome relief from the steakhouse’s stale air. She walks briskly towards SHIELD headquarters, pushing through the usual throngs of people until she can see Jack’s shoulders, Jack’s hat, bobbing above the crowd.

 

“Jack--” she calls as she catches up to him. He turns and holds his hands up, warding her off, and she clenches her fists and resists the urge to touch him. Daniel pulls Samberly away, and they continue on, leaving Jack behind.

 

He pulls a pack of Luckys and a lighter out of the breast pocket of his jacket and lights a cigarette while Peggy searches for words. “I’m sorry,” she says at last, as he blows a cloud of smoke over her shoulder.

 

“For what?” he asks, flicking a clump of ash to the ground. “Which part?”

 

“Because...Because you don’t deserve to be spoken to that way.”

 

Jack rolls his eyes. “You’re not Howard Stark’s mother. And you’re not mine. Stop trying to make nice.” He gives her a quick once-over and looks away. “You okay?” he asks, squinting at the street.

 

“Yes,” she says quietly. “A little nervous to go back to the office, I suppose.”

 

He shakes his head sharply. “We oughta go back separate.”

 

Peggy furrows her brow. They’ve done this sort of thing before, under significantly more suspicious circumstances - after the occasional lunch hour assignation at The Pierre, when she’d come back to work with her skin still sticky with sweat under her clothes and a lingering throb between her legs. Then, it had been thrilling to coolly ignore each other, knowing that Jack had only recently spent the better part of an hour with his mouth pressed against her cunt.

 

But now, when he can barely look at her, she feels dread pool in her belly at the thought of staging a separate entrance. She wonders when exactly it was that the secrets they kept started to sour. Or, perhaps, it had been a rotten idea from the beginning.

 

She lets him walk away from her, and she walks back to the office alone.

 

-

 

They have two hours before their meeting with Governor Dewey, and Peggy hides in her office - careful to lift the blinds on the wall of windows that separates the room from the office’s main floor of agents and secretaries to make sure that her cowardice isn’t too obvious. 

 

In the second hour of waiting - of pretending to read reports and pretending not to think about her imminent relocation - Jack arrives at her door. Her desktop intercom buzzes, and her secretary announces his presence.

 

He enters and walks up to her desk stiffly, handing over a letter on SHIELD letterhead, which Peggy takes and skims.

 

“You’re resigning?” she looks up at him incredulously. “You know you don’t have to do that. I’m sure Howard’ll have me in D.C. by next week.”

 

Jack swallows and shifts from foot to foot. Behind him, in her peripheral vision, she can see the curious office pool trying not to gawk at them. 

 

“I know,” he says, quiet but firm. “But I’ve accepted a position with the Bureau in Philadelphia and, well.” He nods towards the letter in her hand.

 

Peggy blinks. She feels a hot rush of blood to her face and urgently wishes that it wouldn’t be outrageously suspicious of her to close the blinds separating them from the view of a prying corps of agents and secretaries.

 

“When,” she starts and stops. “When did you accept this position.”

 

Jack tucks his hands in his pockets. “About an hour ago.”

 

She nods. Embarrassment and confusion and grief simmer in her gut. 

 

“So you’d rather be J. Edgar Hoover’s lapdog?”

 

Jack’s jaw clenches. “Better that than Howard Stark’s.”

 

It strikes her dumb. She stares at the letter in her hands without knowing what to say for a long moment. When she looks up again, Jack swallows. He looks defiant but unsure, certain and uncertain at the same time.

 

“Your resignation is accepted,” she tells him. “You’re dismissed, Chief Thompson.”

 

-

 

Peggy endures a long afternoon of meetings, then turns down Howard’s offer of dinner and finally drags herself back to Bay Ridge after seven in the evening. The apartment is barely lived-in and shabbier than she remembers. Her body feels heavy and tired. She’s only just kicked off her pumps and unzipped the back of her dress when Jack arrives at her doorstep. 

 

She opens the door to him, and he enters wordlessly, wrapping his arms around her, kicking the door shut and kissing her. Against her better judgment, Peggy clings to him, clutching his shoulders and kissing him back fiercely; when his tongue brushes hers, she groans and presses her body tighter against his. Jack runs his hands along the exposed skin at her back, then slides his hands down to grip her behind and ruck up her skirt.

 

They fuck on the floor, with her dress bunched up around her waist and his pants shoved down to his knees. Jack pushes his hand between them and coaxes her body into a shattering orgasm before he gasps against the side of her neck and pulls his cock out of her. Peggy’s can’t be bothered to be upset by the mess he makes on her parquet. Her body feels boneless and sated, but her heart aches.

 

“Sorry,” he says, pushing a sweaty lock of hair off of her forehead. Peggy isn’t sure she knows what he’s apologizing for.

 

Peggy shakes her head and lets a wave of  _ mourning _ hit her. “Everything’s broken,” she says, and her voice cracks, and she hates the sound of it. 

 

Jack kisses her, and for the first time he tells her that he loves her but it only breaks her heart more. She takes him to her bed and they make love again, and Peggy asks him to stay. But when she wakes in the morning, he’s gone.

 

She won’t moon over him, she decides. She drinks a tumbler of bourbon, takes a boiling-hot shower, dresses in her most severe suit, and goes to work. 

 

It’s easy to be angry. It’s harder to be in love.


End file.
